This Month's Link Laziness

The best Tumblr blog I visit these days

- A while back, Comic Art magazine did a feature on all the baller cartoonists who contributed to the fin-de-siecle French magazine Le Rire. It was intense: a ton of amazing artists nobody's ever heard of drawing better than any of the early American comic strip guys and using that luminous early-comics color palette like fucking bosses. Well, here's a bunch more, archived on a pretty swanky website by Coconino Press. Drool away. This, in particular, is like the best thing I've ever seen.

- Diego Gerlach has a tumblr, son. Drop everything.

- Jog writes about Judge Dredd's giant metallic penis, I mean some sweet 2000AD art.

- Gary Groth's Gary Groth-length interview with Kevin Eastman, in which the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cocreator basically undergoes extreme penance for fucking up one of the best chances for a bigger audience alternative comics ever had, the Turtles-funded Tundra Press, is now online. The stuff about Tundra is interesting in a car-crash kind of way, but what I really dug reading about was the one-in-a-million phenomenon of the Turtles blowing up from another shitty black and white independent comic into a multi-billion dollar media franchise basically overnight. Taken all together, it's a quintessentially American story of what happens when lofty artistic goals meet free-market capitalism. Essential reading.

- Say hello to yer new favorite comic: I don't know what it's called, but I think it's Strong Eye Contact, and I know it's by one Chris Adams of Baltimore. Rarely have magic markers worked such luminous brilliance.

- Seth may be a big old pantywaist, but I gotta give the man his props: his deep-immersion craft workshop on designing the Complete Doug Wright book a few years back -- itself perhaps the most criminally under-discussed reprint book of the past half decade or so -- is endlessly fascinating. The detailed discussion of image sequencing by a great cartoonist is aces, but what really sticks out is Seth's discussion of tackling inspirations from other media and making them work in comics. They don't make 'em all like this.

- Man, Darwyn Cooke was a fucking baller before he stopped being one. (Chris Mautner brings the HEAT, son!)

- Oh hey, here's my review of the new Cronenberg movie, A Dangerous Method, which ruled. It's followed by a dizzying review litany from Tucker Stone, who touches on like 85 films as only he can. Good stuff, I think.

- Oh my god. Asking yourself "what's your favorite Michael DeForge comic" is like trying to choose between your own children, but dude. This "Rescue Pet" shit is the bomb.

- I guess it makes sense that my dude Adam McIlwee is a great interview subject as well as a great interviewer. He talks about his new band Wicca Pha$e $pring$ Eternal here -- it's a fun read as well as a way to get up on the band whose tour posters you'll be buying once I start drawing them.

- Marvel Comics: still home to the World's Greatest Heroes. How's that Iron Man miniseries pitch coming?

- And as always, my webcomic AFFECTED continues apace. Lots of cool stuff happening over there as I inch ever closer to the ending. If you're sad I don't write as much comics criticism anymore, go read my actual comics, because they are the reason. If I have the choice to involve myself in comics via talking about other people's or making my own, it's not even a decision. For me at least, creation trumps reaction every time. Follow my comics, kids, because they're where I'm expressing all my ideas about the medium these days. Plus they are real good to read. Every Monday, folks!